Girl of My Dreams (32 page)

My compartment was closing in on me, and I went out into the coach among the other travelers. Wanderers, near-vagrants, pilgrims, commuters. All looked green-gray, ghosts of the Depression, alive by virtue of not having quite stopped breathing. A solemn sad-eyed woman held a baby, even the baby didn't squall but lay slackly in its mother's slack arms. Two people across the aisle from one another spoke in murmurs. A man sat bolt upright in seeming rigor mortis, not moving a muscle or even, when I watched him, blinking. Four men in derbies played cards, silent, grim-faced, almost in slow motion. Two women knitted, wordless, possibly mother and daughter, appearing to add no rows to their patterns. Everyone awake, vigilant against something that could sweep them all away if they dared close their eyes and lose consciousness. I sat down in the empty seat next to the upright man.

We raced the night through the Mojave desert. The people in the coach sat motionless, faces now purple, night shadows from the moon ducking in and out of clouds, faces flickering as if a projector were running too slow. Entropy's tableaux.

I drifted back to my analyst's office. But it wasn't Pogo. I was telling a dream to someone else. As soon as I saw the studio I was afraid, but I couldn't avoid going through the iron gate, the J U B I L E E letters waving to warn me away, the apparition of a studio cop jerking his arm at me to enter. In Mossy's office, which was tubular like the inside of a submarine, I confronted his back, swiveled away from me so I could see only his shiny hair, which had lost its reddish tinge and was jet black. It was clear we were submerged deep below the ocean's surface. I wanted to leave and couldn't.

Mossy turned slowly in his chair until he was in profile and I could see malevolence in his one visible eye with long dark red lashes. His feldspar chin underneath a mirthless smile signaled danger. He turned back to face the knobs and gauges, instruments that were the command controls of this submarine. A flash of light, from undersea lightning or a giant flashbulb, obliterated everything, and Mossy was gone from his chair where an open crate of walnuts had taken his place. The nuts began to shake until their shells cracked and birds flew out, a flight of larks I thought. They swooped and flapped their wings to stay in place the way hummingbirds do. I told them I knew why they were larks and they didn't fool me.

Continuing to dream, I was reporting the dream to the Viennese analyst who had taken Pogo's place, and I worried that Pogo had become ill. “So, ve haf here an exaltation of larks, no?” the Viennese man said as I noted I'd fallen into the hands of one of the very doctors I was trying to avoid. “No,” I said, resenting him for showing off his English to prove he knows a collective noun, “ve haf no exaltation, ve haf only ze larks zat seem to be Mossy transformed, I dunt know vy.” The doctor did not see I was mocking him and rattled right on to the position of birds in Freud's thinking. “Zay are zeggzhual players, like za nuts.” He dragged out his pronunciation of sexual and went into Jung's view of birds as spirits, which led him to Shelley's “To a Skylark.” “Ve are egglectic, no? Ve can be picky and choosy.” He played with lark, both bird and train—“You're on za Lark, heffing a lark, a liddle spree, larking about.” Then his words became the birds and they darkened ominously into shadows that were all over the room. Though he wasn't present I feared Mossy. He flies, he's here, he's gone, he's there, he's everywhere.

The train jolted as though it might have run over a small animal. I pulled myself up from the dream within my dream. The man next to me was still upright, his eyes now shut as if someone had put pennies on them. He bounced stiffly at the jolt yet his eyes did not open. When I looked at him his lips curled into an admonitory smile. Did he see me through his lids, was he dreaming himself?

We were lumbering into San Francisco.

It was after dawn. I was not aware of sunlight. Clack-clack, clack-clack, outside the train the figures were dim, bustling. The faces inside the car arose. The train had stopped. I hurried to my compartment for my suitcase, and when I returned to the coach the souls were moving in the aisle. I stood behind the card players, still in their derbies, looking like four bowling balls in a row. Behind me the sad-eyed mother carried her baby, and the others appeared to have no luggage, only their underslung dismal air. I walked out of the train, out of the station, into the wall of fog.

16

Festival of Resistance

You don't know what it is to be killed until you are brutally, abruptly, surprisingly killed—by someone you thought friendly, a comrade—and after that you will know, it hardly needs declaring, nothing at all. You will presently be extinct. Your knowledge shrinks as you watch your life shrink, watch the knife with the blade eight, ten inches long, make its unstoppable way toward you. Ashes to ashes and nothing to nothing.

The knife was at my arm, held by the enemy I'd thought a friend. Why my arm? He only wants to scare me, I was thinking hopefully as I tried to retreat. At the same time I could see the knife headed north toward my neck.

As a child I saw chickens killed that would flap around after their heads were neatly hatcheted off. One managed a circuit of my grandfather's barn, 360 degrees, coming neatly, amazingly to rest at his feet while he still held the gleaming though stained instrument of its beheading. He laughed. “Will you look at that, Owen? The creature doesn't know it's dead.” It was doubtful I'd make it around the barn.

I held the knife back, that is I held the wrist holding the knife, trying to push it away, but this bulging arm against my own, though twice the age of my arm, was pure brawn, muscled and sinewed and bicepped from thousands of jobs of dockwork, from its hefting and hauling, probably from numberless fights in waterfront bars, until my arm was no match for it despite the doubling, trebling, of my strength through fear.

But was it only fear, fear and desperation, I was feeling? Was there not also the sense that at last, like San Francisco itself, this was something real? And was there not the further sense that my enemy, who had earlier been chummy if not my chum, was in some schoolish way making a mistake that, if only one of our teachers were present, she would have quickly rectified? “No, Steve” (which name I'll temporarily donate to this stevedore), “Owen is your friend, or at least ally, and you remember we had ‘ally' in vocabulary last week and it meant someone on your side who is joined with you in a common purpose, so please, Steven, let Owen go, and Owen, you let Steve loose too or I'll have to keep you both in detention after class and send you to the vice principal who is not stingy with his ruler. No fighting on the playground. Now, Steve, right now!”

But there was no time, no playground to be rescued from by the benevolent teacher, because time was about to stop, four, three, two, and I could hear my breaths as I wondered, since they were surely to be my last, if I had ever heard my own breaths before. How did they smell. The trivia of the condemned facing his executioner.

Mossy had said he thought people would like to see a disaster worse than the Depression. New techniques in miniature and special effects would let him show, convincingly, an earthquake as it destroyed block after block of the great metropolis. “Tell me,” he had said, “exactly what people were doing before the quake struck, what their brothers and mothers-in-law were doing, the way the woman next door was pulverized. Give me details, what happened every second of the quake. How did they survive? Even better, how did those who died die? And then the fire. The fire that follows will be the gravy on the roast beef.”

Now I was the beef about to be carved, the disaster worse than the Depression. Except no one would ever know. Mossy would miss the picture I didn't bring back more than he would me, and Curtt Weigerer would wonder where the rest of his thousand dollars was.

When I arrived in the city, San Francisco not only felt bracing but was also visible to me. I saw through the fog to a place I could understand, or thought I could. Pure and knowable, apparent and transparent—this was the steep-hilled, sea-girt city I entered. One knew where one stood in San Francisco even when the place swam in fog. In Los Angeles, some of the poor and the working class were religious or political freaks, enthusiastically in favor of beating up a labor organizer; some of the rich, on the other hand, were Communists. They may have been the most casual, careless Communists, with butlers, pools, Japanese yard men, may have been cheerfully, hypocritically unaware of the disconnect between their behavior and their ideology, yet they colored themselves Red and called for the abolition of private property, called for the overthrow of the existing structures of state and capital. In San Francisco the poor, the workers, a slice of intelligentsia were where Reds were found if Reds there were at all, and the rich gazed out of the windows of their clubs with horror at any sign of unions. What a relief!

The papers had done interviews on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the quake in 1931, and that's where I started. At the doughty
Call-Bulletin
I bumped into a half sober reporter his colleagues called Roughride Reynolds because he'd actually been with Teddy Roosevelt more or less charging up San Juan Hill in the Spanish American War. Ruddy, big-bellied, laughing in every sentence as he swilled his beer. He told me the whole charge was a sham, that the troops had simply walked up an undefended rise and that he, Reynolds, had staged the photograph that ultimately put the first Roosevelt in the White House. After the war he'd come west and landed on the old
Evening Bulletin
, covering the earthquake when it struck. “Ought-six,” he said, “not one of us thought we'd get out alive. First the quake scared us half to death, then the fire ate up the city.”

I read a few interviews Roughride had done with earthquake survivors for the 1931 series, but he'd lost their addresses. “Fact is, Sonny,” he said to me, “I made up a lot of this, haw haw. Go down into the Tenderloin, or Fisherman's Wharf, old-timers will talk to you. Making a picture, eh? Better have a gentleman of the Fourth Estate in it. Haw.”

At Hearst's
Examiner
, I saw a newsman named Hoover Townsend, a ramrod in pinstripes and a vest. It was hard to imagine him as anything but a banker. I asked what drew him into this line of work. “Someone has to uphold community standards,” he said. His only interviews were with Nob Hill crusties who had their servants tell them what damage the quake and fire were doing.

Better luck at the
Chronicle
, where a reporter named Jack Quin sent me to his cousin Mike who had not only done interviews but also published a pamphlet on the earthquake,
A Celestial Joke
, a bitter screed on the class distinctions present even in a natural disaster. “Oh sure,” Quin told me, shooing his unruly red hair off his freckled Irish face, “everyone pulls together, everyone's in the same boat, the quake reduces everyone to the same level of horror—for all of an hour, two at most. After that the swells take over. ‘Dora, would you make certain there's marmalade for the mister's toast, Bannister will bring round the brougham so Lavinia and myself can survey the destruction downtown. Marquez, do give last night's leftovers to the Ladies Aid but be back to have supper on the table by eight. We'll be wanting the lamb shank this evening.'” Poor Jim Bicker—Mossy was right—would have loved this guy.

Mike Quin slipped his voice back out of his impression of a prissy Nob Hill bluenose. “Christ on a crutch but I'd like to have seen some of them go without their damn lamb shank for one bloody evening!”

I told him I wanted to meet waterfront people who had been around since the turn of the century—gamblers, lowlifes, barkeeps, prostitutes. “You're the boss,” he said, and sent me off to what was left of the old Barbary Coast. Waterfront dives were new to me, but it wasn't hard to get people talking. “What were you doing at the time of the earthquake?” I'd ask, buying someone a beer or a shot. “About what I'm doing now,” they'd all start, and then the tales would pour.

The Barbary Coast had mostly been destroyed in the earthquake and fire, but the grizzled barflies rebuilt the taverns, opium dens, gambling houses, flophouses, and whorehouses for me as if they were all still around the corner. As I listened I saw the henchmen at the studio as neighborhood enforcers with Mossy as their double-breasted head gangster. Pammy would be a singer in a posh gaming house Mossy had in a shakedown vise until the detectives Nils Maynard and Yeatsman foiled him and his crooked cohorts. I myself was the enterprising reporter who exposed the whole scheme.

A one-legged bartender told me he saw three men trapped on the roof of a burning building. “Must have been two thousand people down in the street, stopping to watch as they ran from the flames a block away. A company of soldiers were trying to keep order. The three men on the roof were screaming for help as the fire climbed closer and the roof began to cave in. The Army captain ordered his sharpshooters to aim at the men on the roof so they wouldn't burn. Boom. Boom. Boom. The soldiers shot the three men to kingdom come but at least they weren't roasted alive.”

An old lady with dyed blonde hair rasped that she'd been a madam and her establishment escaped the flames. “No ya wasn't no madam, Minnie,” one of the workmen brayed at her, “Ya was a workin' girl in the old Ruby House, ya know ya was.” The woman joined the laughter and went on. “Ordered all my girls,” she said, “to give it away to any cop or fireman. Saving the city, they were, deserved a little relaxation.”

(Pretty quickly it was obvious that oral history is, in practice if not by definition, nostalgic calisthenics, subject to contamination from what happened later as well as the usual discrepancies imposed by nostalgia itself.)

After the first day Mike Quin met me for a drink, excited about what he claimed was a far better story than the earthquake. “It's happening today right under your nose,” he said. I said I didn't know what he was talking about. “Nevermind, Skinny, make your goddamn moving picture.”